OASIS overview

The Online Archival Search Information System (OASIS) is a publicly available union catalog of archival and manuscript finding aids created by various archives and repositories at Harvard. Point a web browser to http://oasis.harvard.edu/ to access OASIS. Additional access information is available. Technical support for OASIS is provided by the Office for Information Systems (OIS).

Finding aids are detailed descriptions of the contents of archival and manuscript collections, usually including an inventory describing the individual items in the collection and background information that puts the collection in a context. See a sample finding aid: Alcott family. Papers, 1830-1888: Guide.

OASIS provides a web-accessible interface to finding aids with phrase and keyword search capabilities in a variety of indexes and search limitation by date or date ranges. More detailed descriptions of the system and its history are available.

Curators and archivists from around the university are creating finding aids for OASIS using SGML (the Standard Generalized Markup Language), and specifically the EAD (Encoded Archival Description). The encoding of finding aids is done by staff in the repositories using off-the-shelf software and sent to OIS for inclusion in OASIS. Participating Harvard archives and repositories are listed on the OASIS web site. The number of participating repositories is expected to increase over the next few years (see Participation procedures).